Tuesday

No Exit

In the interest of fairness and balance, I note a study has been released that claims Obama's tax plans would cost the economy 700,000 jobs. (According to another study, that's actually 100,000 jobs fewer than The Rominee's!) It was done by Ernst & Young, at the behest of several Republican entities.

And in the interest of self-reflection and honesty, I admit I found myself ready to question the report without even reading it. I question the source, I question the motives of those who commissioned it, I question the findings. But I really don't know. When it comes to analyses of various political proposals -- the Ryan/Rominee budget, the effects of the ACA, the impending "fiscal cliff" for examples -- I've come to trust the CBO as the most impartial source of financial forecasting. Fact is, the CBO has said much the same thing.

Since, as CBO notes, “spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of GDP in any year [since World War II]” and Ryan seeks a high level of defense spending — he increases defense funding by $228 billion over the next ten years above the pre-sequestration baseline — the rest of government would largely have to disappear. That includes everything from veterans’ programs to medical and scientific research, highways, education, nearly all programs for low-income families and individuals other than Medicaid, national parks, border patrols, protection of food safety and the water supply, law enforcement, and the like. (Blogatorial comment: As I've been saying ad nauseum!)

So there you have it: two imperfect plans, one of which will apparently cost jobs (the White House pushes back), the other of which, in addition to that, will end the country. In a functioning democracy, where both parties were willing to find solutions and to accept less than their version of the whole pie (one, demonstrably, has been and is), where it wasn't the case that one party had gone nuts and had become in the thrall of the very moneyed interests whose only concern is their personal profits, there might be reason to think resolution was possible. If one party weren't willing to see the end of government, and therefore of the country, rather than compromise on anything, things would look different.

If such a democracy exists, it's most certainly not on this side of the Atlantic and south of the Canadian border. So it's undeniable, as I've said a million times. We're: